Thanks everyone for your support on our pricing test on Amazon. I hope you enjoy the book!
Sorry we couldn't offer an epub at the same exact time, but don't worry, we are planning something special within our own web store for it, where both the epub and mobi formats are available (and without DRM; yuck, hate DRM, nasty DRM). We have to code this special feature up first -- and make sure it doesn't break anything [did y'all notice how adding the special Harry Potter button on Amazon broke the site so nobody could buy
any ebooks for several hours? oopsie!] -- then I'll be sure to let you know here.
Let's see, what other questions were there. (I'm not allowed back-to-back posts, so I'll have to answer everything in this one. If I've missed something just poke me on it.) Prices in the UK, interesting, I didn't know they did that, nor do I know exactly how we can anticipate it. Hmm, fascinating. I'll try to figure that out. I have heard they add stuff on top of the price we set; all we get as publisher is a choice between "Let amazon pick the price based on the US price, or pick a specific price" but they apparently still add stuff. (What's interesting about you saying they add tax on top is that in the US Amazon has stoutly refused to collect tax; though governments being what they are, I can't see Amazon holding out forever on that. I know that in the state where I live Amazon cut us off from the affiliate program several years ago because my state passed a law saying online stores had to collect sales tax on sales made to buyers in the state if they had an affiliate program here even if they had no physical store here... so Amazon pulled the affiliate program from us and several other states. Not that I ever got much from it personally, but it was annoying. So it's interesting to see they do collect tax for other countries.)
To those who suggested we would prefer sales within our store -- absolutely, as then Amazon doesn't take their large bite... but the facts of the market are that people overwhelmingly prefer buying from Amazon right now. Our sales on Amazon dwarf our sales on any other channel, including B&N. (Not like this is any secret; this is generally the case for most authors and publishers I talk with.) Amazon has set up a compelling ecosystem with the Kindle, making it really easy for people and with an as-yet unbeatable breadth of selection in one place. I give them kudos for what they've done to make ebooks so popular. I'd love for their to be a viable (comparable-sized-sales) competitor or two, but the world just isn't there yet. As to jswolf's questions about why we didn't include other channels at 99cents, as I explained to him in email, we wanted to keep the experiment simple so we have unambiguous results, thus we chose to conduct it solely on Amazon. Yes, as the CEO of ReAnimus Press that was ultimately my decision to approve, but I did so since my background is as a scientist (I was a computer science professor for a long time); we wanted to be sure the experiment was going to be sound for us, and we carefully designed the parameters so it would be. Now we'll analyze the results to decide if that price makes sense elsewhere. (And we'll do something for epub folks to make up for it in any event.)
I personally prefer epubs for my own reading, and I agree about the limitations of formatting in mobis. Boy do I feel your pain there! We try with our titles to get the mobis formatted nicely, but the spec is so incredibly limited. (In our case we aim to match the basic print layout of indented paragraphs, no blank lines between paragraphs, chapters on a new page, a good TOC, etc.) (I'd also say, if you see any formatting or other glitches in our books, definitely do tell us, and we'll fix them. We try very hard to get ours nicely formatted and error-free. Images, though, ai-yi-yi, what a pain. There are a few of ours that have charts and such, and they seem to be fine in one reader and hard to read in the next, so until that settles out we've taken to posting a PDF of the embedded graphics so folks can download them if they're having trouble.)
Ebooks and their formats are still in their infancy, so it's just part of the growing pains. They are so much cooler than paper books (IMHO)
that it's all good. It's been a dream of mine to have all the thousands of books on my shelves available as ebooks, so I'm just glad I've had the opportunity to start ReAnimus Press to help make that a reality in some small way. I love this job!